Water Like a Stone

by Deborah Crombie

  But today only Joseph sat at the table, his dark, curly head bent over paper and pencils. He hadn’t looked up since Annie had stepped down into the cabin. Gabriel and the little girl, Marie, had stopped on the steps behind her, adding to Annie’s sense of unease.

  “Hello, Joe,” she said. He must be getting on for nine, she thought, a handsome, well-made boy who seemed to have outgrown the problems that had plagued him as a baby and toddler.

  He had been two when his parents had first taken him to the local hospital. They’d told the attending doctor that the boy was having fits, and had several times stopped breathing.

  After examining the boy, the doctor reported that he could find no evidence of seizures, but that the child had bruising on his arms and legs that might have been due to a violent fit.

  Over the next few months, the Wains took Joseph to the hospital again and again, although the staff ’s findings continued to be inconclusive. Up until that time, the Wains had lived a nomadic life, but because of the child’s poor health, Gabriel had found temporary work near Nantwich. Also, Rowan had become pregnant again, and was having a difficult time.

  Frustrated and unused to dealing with the hospital bureaucracy, Gabriel Wain had become increasingly belligerent with the doctor and the nursing staff. The boat people had always had a healthy disregard for hospitals, and Gabriel himself had been one of the last babies delivered by Sister Mary at Stoke Bruene on the Grand Union Canal, the nursing sister who spent her life ministering to the needs of the canal community.

  On calling up the child’s National Health records, the doctor learned that this was not the first time the Wains had sought help for their son. When Joseph was an infant, they had taken him to a Manchester hospital, saying that he couldn’t keep food down. Again, no diagnosis had been made.

  The doctor’s suspicions were aroused, and after a particularly difficult altercation with Gabriel, he had turned Joseph’s records over to Social Services.

  His accompanying report was damning. He believed the parents were manufacturing symptoms, and possibly abusing the boy, for attention. His official accusation—Annie could no longer think of it as a diagnosis—had been MSBP, Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

  It had been her job, as the social worker assigned to the case, to investigate the doctor’s allegations.

  “You probably won’t remember me, Joe,” she said now, “but I knew you when you were little.”

  Joseph glanced at her, then nodded, his eyes downcast again, and from the color that rose in his cheeks she realized that he must be painfully shy. She wondered if the family had stayed in one place long enough for either child to be enrolled in school.

  “Your mummy wanted to see—” she had begun, when Gabriel spoke from behind her.

  “Through there,” he said, gesturing towards the passageway that led to the galley and the sleeping cabins beyond. He stepped down into the cabin, Marie clinging to his leg like a limpet, and the small space seemed suddenly claustrophobic. For a moment Annie felt frightened, then she told herself not to be absurd. Gabriel wouldn’t harm her—and certainly not in front of his wife and children.

  She followed his instructions, moving through the tidy galley and into the cabin beyond. Here, the curtain had been pulled back a few inches, enough to illuminate the figure lying propped up in the box bed.

  “Rowan!” Annie breathed, unable to stop herself. If she had thought the woman looked ill when she had seen her yesterday, today her skin seemed gray, and even in the filtered light of the cabin, her lips had a blue tinge.

  Rowan Wain smiled and spoke with obvious effort. “I heard you.” She nodded towards the window that overlooked the towpath. “I couldn’t let you go, thinking we didn’t appreciate what you did for us all that time ago. But there’s nothing we need now. We’re just fine on our own.”

  Annie was conscious of Gabriel standing in the doorway, with both children now crowded behind him, but she tried to ignore their presence. As there was no other furniture in the small cabin and she didn’t want to talk to Rowan while hovering over her, she sat down carefully on the hard edge of the box bed. Gabriel had made it himself, she remembered, a fine example of his carpentry skills.

  “You’ve got yourself a boat now,” Rowan continued with a smile. “You and your husband?”

  Facing this woman who had given her entire life to her family, Annie found herself suddenly unable to admit she’d abandoned her husband on what she suspected Rowan would see as a whim. “Finding oneself” was a strictly middle-class luxury. Nor, aware of Gabriel’s hostile presence behind her, was she sure she wanted to admit to being alone. “Yes,” she said at last, nodding.

  “But yesterday you were working her on your own. And well, too.”

  “My husband—he had some business at our house in Tilston.” The prevarication came a little more easily, but then she remembered she’d told Gabriel she’d gone back to using her maiden name. Well, she’d just have to bluff it out as best she could. “He’ll be back soon,” she said with an internal grimace, knowing she had just marked herself out as someone who used a narrowboat for an occasional second home, a practice that earned little respect from the traditional boater. “I’m surprised I—we hadn’t run across you before now.”

  Rowan looked away. “We were up Manchester way for a while, but the jobs dried up.”

  From the silence of the generator, the mean fire, and the slight shabbiness of the boat itself, things had not improved on the Shropshire Union. The boat was so cold that Rowan was covered in layers of blankets over the old woolen jumper she wore, and when she spoke, her breath made tiny clouds of condensation. Annie said, “Rowan, if things aren’t going well, I could—”

  “No.” Rowan glanced at her husband as she cut Annie off. “We’ll do fine. You should g—”

  Annie wasn’t going to let herself be fobbed off so easily. “Rowan, you’re obviously not well. How long has this been going on? Have you seen a doctor?”

  “I’m just a bit tired,” Rowan protested, but her voice was breathy, a thread of sound. “With Christmas and all. I’ll be fine when I’ve had a rest.”

  It was a game effort, but Annie now saw things besides the pallor—the hollows under the woman’s eyes, the protrusion of the bones from the stick-thin wrists, the lank hair that had once been glossy.

  “Rowan,” she said gently. “I think you haven’t been well for some time. You must get some help.”

  “You know I can’t.” Rowan sat up, grasping Annie’s arm with unexpected strength. “No doctors. No hospitals. I won’t take a chance with my children.”

  Annie laid her hand over the other woman’s fingers, gently, until she felt Rowan’s grip relax. “There’s no reason why your seeing a doctor should put the children at risk. They’re both well. You must—”

  “You know what my records will say.” Rowan’s voice rose with urgency. “It never comes off—you told me that yourself—even though I was cleared. Someone will come, looking, prying, and this time it won’t be you.”

  Annie closed her eyes and took a breath as the memories flooded back. The case had landed on her desk, one of many, and she’d seen enough abuse in her years as a social worker that at first she’d been predisposed to take the report at face value, a fact that now shamed her. She’d held such power, to have taken it so lightly. If her findings had agreed with the doctors’, the Wains’ case would have gone to the civil courts. There, the family, marginally literate and with no funds for counsel, would have been helpless against the unlimited resources of the state and the testimony of so-called expert witnesses. It was almost certain that both Joseph and little Marie would have been taken into foster care, and possible that one or both parents would have faced criminal charges.

  She had first interviewed the Wains aboard the Daphne. She’d been unexpectedly charmed by the boat, and by Rowan’s shy hospitality. The first niggle of doubt had crept in as she’d observed a mother whose devoted care of her son seemed in no way calcu
lated to call attention to herself, a father who was surly to her but unfailingly gentle with the little boy. By this time, Joseph’s seizures seemed to have stopped, and neither parent displayed anything but heartfelt relief.

  Although puzzled as she continued to visit the family, as she watched them time after time with their child, Annie became more and more convinced that the charges against them were unfounded. So she had gone with her instincts, but it had taken her months of investigation, of interviews, of sifting through medical records, to come up with the means to prove herself, and them, right.

  Their nomadic life had made the process enormously difficult. They spent little time in one place, had no extended family, no intimate contact with others who could substantiate their accounts of little Joseph’s illnesses. But during one interview, Rowan told her about Joseph’s first seizure.

  They’d been on the Grand Union Canal, below Birmingham, moored alongside several other boats. Gabriel had been on deck and Rowan in the cabin with the sleeping toddler when the boy had stiffened, his back arching, his arms and legs flailing. Then the child had gone limp, his skin turning blue. Rowan had lifted him, shaking him frantically while shouting to Gabriel for help.

  Gabe had come plunging down the hatchway with Charlie, a quiet, lanky young man who drifted from one mooring to the next on an old Josher. But when Charlie saw the still child in Rowan’s arms, his indolence vanished. “Ambulance training,” he’d said shortly. Taking Joseph from Rowan, he’d laid him out on the cabin floor, and after checking his airway, had given the baby a quick puff of breath, then pressed on his chest. Once, twice, three times, and then Joseph’s body had jerked in a spasm and he’d begun to wail.

  They had never run across Charlie again, however, and Rowan didn’t even know if he was still on the boats.

  But Annie was determined to substantiate Rowan’s story, and her search for the elusive Charlie proved her true introduction to the Cut. She’d begun by car, working in a widening circle from Cheshire, crisscrossing middle England as she tried canal-side shops and marinas, pubs and popular mooring spots, talking to anyone who might have had contact with the Wains or might have news of Charlie.

  She soon discovered not only that had she set herself a well-nigh impossible task, but that there were places boaters congregated that couldn’t be reached by car. She had almost despaired when a boater told her he knew Charlie; had, in fact, recently seen him on the Staff and Worcs Canal, below Stoke.

  The next day Annie had hired a boat with her own funds. She knew her department would never deem it a reasonable expense. But she also realized that somewhere over the past few weeks, she’d slipped over the line between reason and obsession.

  She’d had little idea how to handle the boat. Even remembering the mess she’d made of her first few locks made her shudder. Terrified and clumsy, she was kept from swamping the boat or falling from a lock gate only by blind luck and help from fellow boaters. But she had persevered, her enchantment with the Cut growing over the next few days as she worked her way south along the Shropshire Union towards Birmingham. She learned to recognize the Joshers, the restored boats that had once belonged to the Fellows, Morton, and Clayton carrying company, and when one evening she saw the distinctive silhouette of a Josher moored near the bottom of the Wolverhampton 21, her heart had raced. As she drew nearer, she made out the faded letters on the boat’s side: Caroline. That was the name both the Wains and her boater informant had given her. Charlie did exist, and she had found him. Jubilation fizzed through her.

  He was just as the Wains had described him, although not now so young, a thin, freckle-faced man with his sandy hair drawn back in a ponytail. When he understood what Annie wanted, he’d invited her into his tiny cabin for a beer, and he’d given her an account of the incident almost identical to Rowan Wain’s. Trying to contain her excitement, Annie wrote out his statement and had him sign it.

  “Poor little bugger,” he’d said when they’d finished. “It was obviously some sort of seizure. Did they ever get him sorted out? The mother said he’d been unwell as an infant. Gastric reflux. I remember thinking it odd that she knew the term.”

  Back aboard her hire boat, settled in her cabin with a celebratory glass of wine, Annie tried to work out what to do next. If Joseph’s seizures were real, why had the doctor been so ready to discount his parents’ accounts? And was there some connection between the problems he’d had as an infant and his later seizures?

  With regret, she’d returned to Nantwich and traded her hire boat for piles of paper. Eventually, her diligence paid off. She found the anomaly in the records from the Manchester hospital where Joseph had previously been treated. One report mentioned an earlier admission, to a hospital near Leeds, where Joseph had been prescribed medication for gastric reflux. And yet in the current doctor’s report to Social Services, he stated that Joseph had never been treated for any of the ailments described by his parents. How had he missed it?

  Or perhaps more to the point, Annie thought, why had he missed it? She knew the system could fail, knew both doctors and nurses were overworked and overtired, but surely such a serious accusation had merited a thorough review of the little boy’s case?

  Her suspicions aroused, she began interviewing hospital staff and checking the doctor’s record. The doctor had a reputation, she found, for his lack of patience with parents who questioned his judgment or took up too much of his time. He had, in fact, made a diagnosis of MSBP in three other cases. Even assuming one believed in the validity of the diagnosis, such a high incidence of the disorder was statistically absurd. All the families had been low income; all had lost their children to foster care.

  Annie had, of course, recommended that Joseph and Marie Wain not be added to the council’s “at risk” register, or placed in foster care. Joseph’s health continued to improve, an occurrence that the other doctors Annie consulted told her was not unusual—sometimes children simply healed themselves as their development progressed.

  She had also made a formal complaint against the doctor in question, but no action had been taken by the hospital authorities. And in spite of all her efforts, Rowan Wain’s records still carried the diagnosis of MSBP, and the stigma of child abuse and mental illness. It could not be expunged.

  Now Annie patted Rowan’s hand in an effort at reassurance. “There’s no reason anyone should look at the children,” she said, yet the scenarios played out in her head. What if Rowan were seriously, even terminally, ill? What if some eager doctor or nurse looked at her records and decided that Rowan—or Gabriel, on Rowan’s death—could not provide suitable care? It could start all over again, and this time she would be unable to protect them.

  Rowan simply shook her head, as if the effort of speech had exhausted her.

  With growing panic, Annie turned to Gabriel. “You must see she can’t go on like this. You’ve got to do something.” The sight of the children’s anxious faces as they pressed against their father kept her from adding Or she might die, but his expression told her he knew. He knew, but he couldn’t risk his children, and the choice was tearing him apart.

  “No hospitals,” he repeated, but the force had gone from his voice and his rugged face was creased with anguish.

  No hospitals. An idea took root in Annie’s mind. It might work—at the very least it would tell them what they were dealing with.

  She gave Rowan’s hand a squeeze, then looked back at Gabriel. “What if…what if I could find someone to come and have a look at Rowan? What if it were strictly off the record?”

  “I’m sure there’s no reason to worry,” Kincaid said. “You know Jules’s temper—after last night, I’m not surprised she couldn’t get through Christmas dinner with Caspar. And she’s always liked to go off on her own when she’s in a funk.”

  After speaking to Lally, his mother had rung Juliet’s mobile number and her home phone, with no response. Then, despite Lally’s pleas, she had rung Caspar to confirm the girl’s story. Rosemary’s mouth
had tightened as she listened, then she’d hung up with unnecessary force. “He says it’s true,” she’d told them. “Juliet walked out without a word to anyone before dinner was even served. He says she meant to inconvenience everyone.”

  Now his mother shook her head. “I don’t like it.” Worry shadowed her eyes, and with a pang, Kincaid saw that she had aged more than he’d realized since he’d seen her last.

  Gemma had gone back to the washing up, but he could see that she was listening with quiet attention. A strand of hair had come loose from her clip, curling damply against her cheek, but he wasn’t quite close enough to reach out and smooth it back.

  His father had come to stand beside his mother; Toby had slipped away from the table and settled on the dog bed, alternating tussling with the three dogs and stroking Geordie’s long ears. And Kit, Kit was watching them, fear flickering in his eyes.

  If Kincaid’s job inclined him to glimpse the potential tragedy in the commonplace, for Kit the possibility was ever real and ever present. In Kit’s world, mothers who left their children might not return. This was a strain the boy didn’t need.

  Inwardly cursing his sister, Kincaid said, “Mum, let’s not call out the cavalry just yet. We know she’s taken the car. She’s probably just gone home for a good sulk, and you may not be doing her any favors by interfering. And in the meantime, Gemma and I can take the boys for a walk while the light lasts. We’ll give the queen a miss, eh?” he added with a wink at Kit. It was a family joke that the queen’s traditional Christmas Day speech was the perfect soporific.

  Gemma nodded towards Toby, who had curled up with an arm round the cocker spaniel, his eyelids at half-mast. “You and Kit go,” she said softly. “Toby and I will stay here and keep your mum and dad company.”